A well-designed energy management control strategy can enhance the operational life span of fuel cell vehicles, reduce their energy consumption costs during operation, and boost overall energy utilization efficiency of the vehicle system, thereby fundamentally improving the economic and safety aspects of fuel cell vehicles. This paper proposes an adaptive optimization algorithm to optimize the equivalent factor, resulting in reduced equivalent hydrogen consumption and achieving improved economy. Concurrently, it ensures that the lithium-ion battery SOC in fuel cell vehicles remains at a stable level, thereby extending battery life. A simulation model is built and experiments are conducted in MATLAB/Simulink. The results show that compared to the traditional PID method, the adaptive optimization algorithm exhibits lower equivalent hydrogen consumption and a smaller change in lithium-ion battery SOC before and after operation, substantiating the superiority of the proposed control algorithm.